Performative pedagogy : writing choreographically a dance space of imaginings

• Main Author: Giard, Marie Annette Monique
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Dance; Improvisation in dance
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10613

Performative Pedagogy is a philosophical essay on dance telling of the necessity to reintegrate dance in the curriculum as well as a performative inquiry that recognizes space-moments of learning realized through performance. Dance/tool of exploration/research is the integration of multiple layers of understandings, intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual, in the absence of word and the presence of silence. This text is a creative response to researchers seeking a legitimate space of recognition for our arts-based processes. Writing choreographically is the integration of phenomenology of kinaesthetic consciousness, hermeneutics, and the not yet known in a moment of imagining. Text sometimes linear, sometimes not, inter-danced with personal photographs, autobiographical narratives, poetry, dancing on the page, exploring a space moment of imagining with you. I explore concepts such as "embodied awareness", "thinking in movement", "voice of the soul", "intentional rhythm", and "language" using a methodology of performative inquiry. Writing choreographically a dance space of imagining invites the reader in a historical journey of dance, from Ruth St-Denis, Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman to post-modernists Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, the Grand Union, and Canadian choreographers Francoise Sullivan, Jennifer Mascall, Chick Snipper, and Daniel Soulieres and myself, blurring the boundaries between dancers, choreographers, viewers, as well as between the mediums. This historical movement creates an opportunity for readers to question their own inquiry in dance. Performative Pedagogy: Writing choreographically a dance space of imaginings is an artistic adventure inviting you to re-create meaning within this performative inquiry the same way a spectactor would during a dance performance. Through the explorations of danced moments into the unknown, we may offer pedagogical possibilities.